Pottstown gives Montgomery County Commissioners an earful on listening tour

POTTSTOWN — Problems from the past and issues headed into the future, it was all fair game Monday night as the three Montgomery County Commissioners came to town and met with more than 75 residents who came out to hear what the commissioners had to say, and then to give them a piece of their mind.

Part of a county-wide listening tour, the three-hour meeting at the Montgomery County Community College’s West Campus in Pottstown saw discussion of issues ranging from county housing to human services, from infrastructure to elections, transportation to economic revitalization.

After Commissioners Chairman Josh Shapiro and his fellow commissioners spoke for 40 minutes about the challenges they faced when they took office and what they have done about them, the people in the audience had their chance.

“I don’t like Route 422,” Barbara Smale of Pottstown told the commissioners, talking about her commute to Norristown where she catches a train into Center City Philadelphia.

“Is there going to be a time in my lifetime when I can catch the train here in Pottstown?” she asked.

“In our lifetime? I’d say the chances are pretty slim,” replied Commissioner Leslie Richards, who heads the commissioners’ infrastructure efforts. “I wouldn’t bank on it I have to say.”

The first transportation priority that might affect Smale’s drive is the push to restore a local traffic bridge over the Schuylkill River to ease the bottleneck which occurs every morning on the Route 422 bridge over the river, Richards said.

A restoration of train service will involve years of planning and is unlikely to move forward without an adequate funding scheme, she said.

Several speakers, including Cathy Paretti from Art Fusion 19464, Borough Authority Chairman Tom Carroll and Dave Douglas, a Trappe volunteer who helps out with the homeless in Pottstown, raised the issue of the drop-in center on the 200 block of High Street, and its clients who can discourage shopping and enjoyment of the new Steel City Playhouse next door.

“If it’s a simple matter of moving that center one block away, we can certainly look into that,” replied Shapiro, although Mayor Bonnie Heath indicated the program there may actually be funded by the federal government and not the county.

Hanover Street resident Arthur Green asked that the county commissioners exercise whatever influence they can to oppose a plan by State Rep. Dominic Pileggi from Delaware County to alter the way the state’s electoral votes are assigned from a “winner-take-all” approach as is now used, to one reflecting a percentage of the voter turn-out.

Shapiro described the move as a “grab by one party to give their candidate a better change of winning some of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.”

And then King Street resident and activist Katy Jackson kicked off a long and wide-ranging discussion about public and low-income housing programs.

“We’re over-burdened by people who need social services,” she said, explaining that part of that is due to a high level of low-income housing. “We can’t continue to be a dumping ground for Montgomery County’s disenfranchised.”

Shapiro said any discussion of low-income housing issues should be based on a set of common facts, so he rolled out some numbers to provide a statistical basis for the discussion. Here are a few of those he mentioned:

• Of that less than 15 percent, 70 percent were living in Pottstown already and only about one-quarter come to Pottstown from other communities;

• Less than 8 percent of housing in Pottstown is housing choice.

Borough Councilman Mark Gibson, who arrived after the council meeting set for the same time had concluded, disagreed with some of Shapiro’s numbers.

“That’s my ward,” he said of the first ward in the core of town where many of these rental properties are located.

“I’ve lived there for 53 years and three-quarters of the people in those units using Section 8 are people I don’t know,” Gibson said.

Richards said that much of the county economic revitalization money over the years went into programs encouraging home ownership. To date, the county has spent about $3 million on Pottstown revitalization.

Joel Johnson, the head of the Montgomery County Housing Authority confirmed that vouchers, common called by their previous name, “Section 8,” are a federal program run by his agency, which is outside the direct control of the county commissioners.

He said landlords who accept those vouchers enter into a legal contract with the program and are required to keep the apartments up to code and complaints about them can trigger an inspection.

Craig Brady of Norristown complained that finding out which units do use vouchers is like trying to crack “a secret society,” to which Johnson replied that the law requires the agency to keep the identity of those using vouchers confidential.

He said they will investigate any complaint, but if it turns out not to be a voucher property, they have no authority to enforce codes, which led Commissioner Bruce Castor to suggest that Johnson be sure the complaint is then passed on to the local codes office.

Resident Sue Repko, who writes the Positively Pottstown blog, said she has a theory that the increased amounts of money the housing vouchers can now apply toward rents have had the unintended effect of artificially raising rents landlords could have previously demanded in Pottstown, thus making it more attractive for them to buy some of Pottstown grand old homes, put in apartments and “bleed the property dry and then walk away.”

Judy Memberg, executive director of Genesis Housing Inc., who also sits on Pottstown’s Blighted Property Review Committee, asked if the county could help in supporting laws that make it easier to take blighted properties whose owners cannot be found or identified.

Castor said that in the nearly 30 years he has been in county government, “I think Pottstown has improved dramatically. In Norristown, I have not seen the same level of improvement that I have seen in Pottstown,” he said.

Praising the “quality of law enforcement here and local government, I think Pottstown is headed in the right direction,” Castor said. “I think Pottstown will come back.

David Kraybill, the director of the Pottstown Area Health and Wellness Foundation, said that prediction will more likely come true if the borough gets help developing and attracting jobs with a living wage.

“Job opportunities would solve some of the issues being raised here,” he said.

Andrew Monastra suggested the commissioners use some of their political connections to help “leverage private investment,” as Shapiro described it. Monastra described as “putting us in touch with some of your pals.”

Several speakers praised the work being done by the Montgomery County Community College, praised the commissioners for their support, and also asked that the commissioners not contemplate another $5 million cut to the college budget as was done for 2013.

As an indication of the college’s value to its main campus and to the West Campus in Pottstown, Chamay Roberts, the president of the college’s student government, said in the last year, 918 of the college’s students there have donated more than 33,000 hours of community service to 117 organizations with a value of more than $100,000.

The final stop on the listening tour will be on Monday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. Upper Perkiomen Valley School District Education Center, 2229 E. Buck Road, Pennsburg.